Part 82 (1/2)

From two hundred yards, the man who stepped out of a shadowy cleft and onto the path looked like a goat farmer. He was dressed in cheap clothes that were visibly patched. He leaned on a crooked stick. His face was elaborately bearded and seamed like lizard skin.

Finn adjusted his focus and studied the man.

A farmer.

Definitely a farmer.

Then the man turned and beckoned behind him.

Ten men came up the slope out of the shadows.Ten men leading six horses.

Each of the animals staggered under the weight of heavy burlap bags hung from leather straps.

The men were all dressed as farmers. One of them was a boy who couldn't have been more than ten.The oldest of them was probably sixty, sixty-five.

Just a bunch of s.h.i.+t-kicker dust farmers from the middle of no-f.u.c.kingwhere.

Finn followed them with the monocular, watching them, studying them, looking for a tell that would give them away. Sometimes it was American boots. Or Russian boots. New ones, not old discards. Sometimes it was an iPod or iPad.The Taliban loved that high-tech s.h.i.+t. Sometimes it was a top-quality cell phone or a satellite phone.

Not today.There was none of that.

But, Finn asked himself, what's in those bags?

This was goat and sheep country. n.o.body around here raised cotton.There was no real blanket industry in this corner of the region.

So what was in the bags?

The CIA intel expressed a very high confidence that the next few caravans of opium would include sealed biocontainment flasks filled with a virulent pathogen. Rumor control said that it was a new twist on the seif al-din prion-based thing from a few years back. A new generation of the bug that terrorists had tried to release at the Liberty Bell Center on the Fourth of July. That stuff did something to the metabolism and rewired the brain so that the infected went apes.h.i.+t nuts and started chomping on each other like they were extras in 28 Days Later. Not actual zombies, but the real-world science equivalent.

If it was that, then Finn knew that the caravan couldn't be allowed out of this valley. Even if it was one of the other pathogens, stuff that wasn't 100 percent lethal, the Taliban had to be stopped here. If something with any kind of significant communicability was allowed out, thousands could die. Maybe hundreds of thousands. If it got to the States or to Europe, the potential loss of life was unthinkable. Imagine releasing an airborne pathogen in Times Square on New Year's Eve. Or at the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem. Or at a crowded airport like Heathrow.

The orders Rattlesnake Team had been given left no room for error. And it had no provision for mercy.